paimin writes: "A struggle is breaking out in San Francisco over whether the developer of a publicly-funded installation of real-time tracking for the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency has a right to control the use of data from the system. The situation is not totally clear, but this sure seems like an attempt to use patent threats to hijack public data.

The city paid for the system and the developer claims he lost money on the deal, and now he's shutting down applications like Routesy and Munitime that use data from the system unless they license the "copyrighted" data from him."